Monday, April 30, 2018

Adelaide & Melbourne Pedestrian Traffic

The City of Adelaide provides a free Wi-Fi service in the central business district and North Adelaide. Data.Gov.au provides a dataset that allows you to see when and where the public log-in to this Wi-Fi network. The data includes the number of hourly connections to each of the system's access points.

The Adelaide Traffic Analyzer uses the Data.Gov.au data to infer the amount of foot traffic on Adelaide's streets at different times of the day and on different days of the week. If you enter a day and time you can view the number of connections made at that time to each Wi-Fi access point. The number of connections are visualized on the map by scaled markers. The bigger the marker then the more Wi-Fi traffic witnessed by that access point.

The same developers, Datab, have created a similar map for Melbourne. The Melbourne Pedestrian Tracker actually uses data from the Melbourne Pedestrian Counting System to show the amount of pedestrian traffic on the city's streets by time of day and by day of the week.